The Katz Center Plays Well with Others
The theme of sound and music catalyzed a range of scholarly collaborations during the fall semester.
During the fall semester of 2023, the Center built on the theme of music and sound to create a range of intellectual partnerships, developing scholarly programming that enhanced and expanded the discussions happening around the seminar table and in the hallways at 420 Walnut Street.
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On the evening of Tuesday, November 7, 2023, an audience convened in the Orrery Pavilion of the Kislak Center for Special Collections at Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, to attend a round table and performance on the music of Salamone Rossi, a 17th-century Jewish Italian composer.
The Center followed the lead of Mauro Calcagno of the Department of Music, convening 2023–24 fellow Edwin Seroussi (Hebrew University), musicologist Rebecca Cypess (Rutgers University), and mezzosoprano Meg Bragle (Penn), and together they delivered a lively discussion not only of Rossi’s work but of his significance in historical and musical context. Meg Bragle sang some illustrative sections of Rossi’s music, accompanied by Rebecca Cypess on the harpsichord. Thanks to John Pollack and Lynn Farrington, musical manuscripts and other related historical documents were on display in Lea Library to accompany the roundtable.
A full concert of Rossi’s music took place under the auspices of Penn Live Arts on November 9.
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On December 4, three scholars of sound studies joined the fellows to discuss the sonic aspects of Jewish languages in a range of methodological and historical contexts. We welcomed Sarah Bunin Benor of Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion (Los Angeles) to discuss distinctiveness in Jewish languages around the world. Benor was joined by Gabriella Safran from Stanford University, who spoke about her project tracking the perception of the Jewish voice as obnoxious or humorous in a range of sources. The third speaker was Penn doctoral candidate in comparative literature Hila Kohen who showed how complex and entangled the idea of a mother tongue can be for Jews in polyglot lived landscapes.
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On October 30, 2023, the Katz Center joined forces with a sister institution: the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and their Frankel Institute fellows. Michigan’s fellowship theme this year is “Jewish Visual Cultures,” and their head fellows happen to be prolific past Katz Center fellows Richard I. Cohen and Deborah Dash Moore. Together the two institutions devised a program on a topic that spoke to both groups: music and the movies. Film scholar Noah Isenberg gave a talk called “Billy Wilder, Hot Jazz, and Other Jewish Preoccupations of Berlin in the 1920s,” after which the fellows broke out into groups to meet each other and discuss Isenberg’s talk, as well as Jewish studies and the arts more broadly.
